Hi,
I've been lurking here for a while and following the discussion of RDF/A
with interest.
I have one question, which seems rather basic so may already have been
addressed.
If the intent is that RDF/A provides an XML language that can be used in
association with _any_ other XML language, not just XHTML - which is
what I understand from section 2.2 and section 3.2 - i.e. RDF/A is what
I think is sometimes referred to as a "parasite language", then I guess
it will be necessary to namespace-qualify the RDF/A attributes, as is
done in e.g. XLink, XForms etc. (Otherwise, we can't distinguish an
RDF/A rel/rev (etc) attribute from MyHypotheticalML's existing use of
rel/rev (etc) attributes to convey quite different semantics)
I saw Ralph Swick's suggestion that the RDF/A attribute names should be
associated with the http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2 namespace, and that
sounds good.
However, my understanding of XML Namespaces is that in an example like
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
>
<head>
<link about="http://example.org/doc" rel="dc:creator"
href="http://example.org/person" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
the xmlns attribute does not affect the unprefixed attribute names i.e.
the about, rel and rev attribute names are _not_ associated with the
namespace name http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2 (i.e. this is the case
of the first "Vikram Seth" example in [1])
So to ensure that those attribute names _are_ associated with a
namespace name, they would need to be prefixed in XHTML:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:xhtml2="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2"
>
<head>
<link xhtml2:about="http://example.org/doc" xhtml2:rel="dc:creator"
xhtml2:href="http://example.org/person" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Is that right please? Or am I confused? Quite probably ;-)
Thanks
Pete
[1] http://www.jclark.com/xml/xmlns.htm
-------
Pete Johnston
Research Officer (Interoperability)
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
tel: +44 (0)1225 383619 fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
mailto:p.johnston@ukoln.ac.ukhttp://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.johnston/